All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.

The landscape which, a few weeks earlier, had been blotted out by dust was now hazy with moisture.

Shortly before the monsoon, the heat becomes very intense. It is said that the more intense it becomes the more abundantly it will draw down the rains, so one wants it to be as hot as can be. And by that time one has accepted it – not got used to but accepted; and moreover, too worn-out to fight against it, one submits to it and endures.

The rest of the time Olivia was alone in her big house with all the doors and windows shut to keep out the heat and dust.

Westernized Indians don't like my books and I tend not to like westernized Indians - so we're quits.

India always changes people, and I have been no exception

I am dissatisfied with everything I have ever written and regard it all only as a preparation for that one work which probably I don't have it in me to write but which I hope I can go on trying for.

Film, for me, is in two stages. One is when I write the script more or less on my own - that's the nice bit. And then comes for me the unpleasant bit when they all go off, 100 people - actors and camera people and film and sound - and I stay away. When they go into the editing room, I come in again, and that's the bit I like.

Perhaps I'm just fickle by nature and get tired of countries the way other women do of husbands or lovers.

I am a central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis. I am irritable and have weak nerves.